[LinuxBIOS] reliable boot loader

[Peter Stuge]

On Sat, Mar 31, 2007 at 11:48:56AM -0400, joe at smittys.pointclark.net wrote:
> nuni bootloader is written in 16 bit assembly and compiled with
> nasm. Does that matter?

Yes, actually. Good point.


> From what I can tell it does have it's own hd drivers built in.
> Would it need to be converted to 32 bit C to work as a payload?

It doesn't have to be C, but it needs to be compiled into 32-bit
machine code, all payloads are ELF file, started in protected mode.

See http://linuxassembly.org/

Also, (keyboard) input and (VGA) output needs to be rewritten to not
depend on interrupt services. One could look at the FILO source for
ideas, or just settle with using serial for example.

Note this last I/O part is difficult if not impossible to test if
running nuni as a standalone program in Linux since there will
already be other drivers using the same resources. (But you could
unload the serial driver and work on nuni serial port support.)


//Peter